These variances suggest that the future of newspapers, rather than being determined entirely by sweeping trends, can be significantly affected by company culture and management — even at papers of quite different sizes.

A culture of inertia, and a lack of appetite for risk

And what is this cultural problem? According to Pew, several of the senior managers who were interviewed described a culture of “inertia” that made change difficult to achieve within the paper, and another executive said bluntly that “there’s no doubt we’re going out of business right now.” According to this executive, no one wanted to take the risk of trying to change or innovate because of a fear that they would not succeed — and then their company would fail anyway, and they would be blamed for it. “There might be a 90-percent chance you’ll accelerate the decline if you gamble and a 10-percent chance you might find the new model,” this executive said, and “no one is willing to take that chance.”

That sense of inertia and the fear of failure are two of the biggest stumbling blocks holding some newspaper chains back from disrupting their own businesses instead of standing by and watching while others disrupt them. This is what media consultant Anil Dash of Expert Labs and Activate Media means when he says that more media companies need to “think like startups.” Startups have no legacy business to disrupt, so they don’t have to worry about the impact on their bottom line (since most don’t have one of those either), and the best are not afraid of failure. If anything, they seek it out, so they can learn from it.

It’s no coincidence that in a number of presentations about his approach, Paton — who has since become CEO of the Media News Group newspaper chain — talks about the issues that newspapers have with their cultures, and how in his view one of the biggest changes that most traditional papers have to take is to “put the digital types in charge of everything.” This is likely not a comfortable message for many news executives to hear, but it comes closer to a solution than the road taken by many, which is to put newspaper managers in charge of digital. In a lot of cases, this is like putting the chickens in charge of managing the fox.

It’s refreshing to see some newspapers experiment with their own disruption, as the Washington Post has via projects such as its news-recommendation engine Trove and its Facebook social-reading app. The paper also just hired Rob Malda — better known as Commander Taco, the founder of pioneering online community Slashdot — as chief strategist for its internal WaPo Labs unit. But for too many newspapers, disrupting their own culture is something that just doesn’t come naturally, and that could literally mean the difference between life and death.